HP’s Serviceguard for Linux will now support Novell Suse and Red Hat Xen VMs, the company announced. The computer maker has also outlined its Strategy Workshop and Migration Assessment Services, aimed at helping enterprises roll out OpenLDAP directories.

Ubuntu

Canonical is planning to surpass Mac OS X in the next coming two years but without a revolutionary change in the Ubuntu GUI it is close to impossible. Will has made a good attempt by designing some of the best mockups of Intrepid Ibex ever and with such a design, Ubuntu can easily take over Mac OS X soon enough.

Take a loot at some of the Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex Mockup Design created by Will.

F/OSS

The Polish Ministry of National Education is advising schools and universities to use Open Source software. The recommendation comes at the end of a volunteer campaign to help schools switch to Open Source.

The Ministry recommended in a statement that schools and universities use OpenOffice. The application suite is sufficiently mature and advanced to be used for teaching and for office use in education and science institutes. “OpenOffice can successfully substitute proprietary applications and will result in significant savings on licenses.”

Health

Bringas eventually wants to make the entire clinic operate only on open source software. At the moment the staff uses OpenOffice.org, but he also has plans to replace all of the Windows terminals with desktop Linux machines. He continues to search for an outside investor to fund the project.

It may hard to compete against Free software, but it is perfectly legitimate competition. In the Maureen O'Gara fiasco, you can see her role in overstating the legal dangers to the GNU GPL, as well as accusations against IBM. She “plants” articles for Microsoft. The word “plant” is actually used there in the leaked E-mail correspondence, which is a must-read.

The courtroom seems like a convenient scene to fight Free software. There are just too many talented developers who are happily (and often voluntarily) working together, sharing code with little or no restriction. The antiquated consumer-producer role-playing is blurred, sometimes reversed. It’s a development carnival that it not artificially controlled by so-called ‘incentives to innovate’, i.e. intellectual monopolies that disallow use, limit sharing, forbid backward-engineering, discourage standards, and neglect users’ needs (feedback or patches).

Inna Vator? Inna Who?

Ironically, it’s the company so infamous for knockoffs that now accuses Free software of being a set of imitations, as opposed to reactionary code intended to prevent lock-in that’s imposed upon it. Many years ago came this admission of lack of originality from The Man who Wears a Sweater.

“Hey, Steve [Jobs], just because you broke into Xerox’s store before I did and took the TV doesn’t mean I can’t go in later and steal the stereo.”

–Bill Gates, Microsoft

Not much has changed since then. Those who saw products like Zune or Vista know that Microsoft just plays catch-up. On the Web, for example, it’s living in Google’s shadow and creating identical (and yet failing) services shortly after Google announces these. Here is a good quote from someone who has seen this pattern for decades.

“Our friends up north [Microsoft] spend over five billion dollars on research and development and all they seem to do is copy Google and Apple.”

–Steve Jobs, 2006

Microsoft Uses Intellectual Monopolies to Attack FOSS Again

Originality has become somewhat of a cliché, but in this day and age most people assume that Microsoft invented the windowed interfaces, the Web browser, the spreadsheet and the word processor, so the company is able to get away with many baseless and daring accusations. People were (mis)led to believe that Microsoft “brought computers to the masses” [1, 2, 3, 4] that that it “innovates”, but here is what Linus Torvalds shrewdly said last month:

“I think that “innovation” is a four-letter word in the industry. It should never be used in polite company. It’s become a PR thing to sell new versions with.”

“It was Edison who said “1% inspiration, 99% perspiration”. That may have been true a hundred years ago. These days it’s “0.01% inspiration, 99.99% perspiration”, and the inspiration is the easy part. As a project manager, I have never had trouble finding people with crazy ideas. I have trouble finding people who can execute. IOW, “innovation” is way oversold. And it sure as hell shouldn’t be applied to products like MS Word or Open office.”

It’s time to be aware and point out that, while Microsoft is pretending to be part of the open source movement, its highly disingenuous and ambivalent role is showing. Like the boy who cried “Cancer!”, the European Commission no longer believes Microsoft. It’s all about AAABS. Sadly, some people are buying it. A few people investigate further and explore beyond press releases and face value to find out some truths. Microsoft itself is mocking “open source” in its very own formal reports, which are targeted at investors. That’s right. Here’s a short analysis of this paradox.

Microsoft’s annual 10-K filing with the SEC has a few lines in it about open source as a competitor that has raised more than a few eyebrows. I’m scarcely surprised, especially since it highlights Microsoft’s schizoid behavior over open source.

“A number of commercial firms compete with us using an open source business model by modifying and then distributing open source software to end users at nominal cost and earning revenue on complementary services and products,” the Volish statement proclaimed.

[...]

And the Vole did further bleat: “To the extent open source software gains increasing market acceptance, our sales, revenue and operating margins may decline.”

Matt Asay had more to say about the company’s deliberate (and probably bogus) ignorance. It would rather milk the aging cash cows than accept an inevitable change in business models, which would benefit both ‘consumers’ and ‘producers’ (a simplistic dual-role world).

In reading through Microsoft’s annual report, I am struck by how far the company has come in appreciating the threat that open source brings to Redmond.

Microsoft’s adjacent press in Redmond is stronger with its accusations. Rather than embrace FOSS as IBM did, Microsoft chooses to ridicule FOSS for being a copycat and an enemy to “intellectual property”. This proof of hostility is priceless.

Microsoft lately has made some peace offerings to the open source world and even joined the open source Apache Software Foundation, yet the report depicts open source as top financial risk factor.

In other industries, research continues up to a point where further research costs too much to be feasible. At this stage, the industry’s output merelyconsists of replacing parts that have worn out.

However, in the software sector, a computer program that is fully debugged will perform its function forever without requiring maintenance or modification. “What this means is that unlike socks that wear out, and breakfast cereal that is eaten, a particular software product can be sold to a particular customer at most once. If it is to be sold to that customer again, it must be enhanced with new features and functionality.” This inevitably means that even if the industry were to approach maturity, any software company that does not produce new and innovative products will simply run out of customers! Thus, the industry will remain innovative whether or not software patents exist.

In essence, as Professor Deepak Phatak would probably say, these patents are means for multi-nationals to loot the country. It’s colonialism or imperialism that’s marketed as beneficial or benign using Microsoft’s overseas workers and/or allies.

Intellectual Monopolies Attack Culture

We have extended copyright terms to the point of inanity–competition moves ever faster, to the point that technology copyrights and patents seem to be measured in decades. And then there is patent law, home of a widening array of specious, obvious patents.

YouTube is at the moment somewhat of a centre of attention in the copyrights debate. Poisoning of the well is used as an excuse to stifle or shut down a competing business model. Groklaw follows this closely.

88% of YouTube is New and Original Content, Professor Says

If you can watch it without dropping your litigation against YouTube, Viacom, you need to see a doctor right away. Seriously. I hope YouTube lawyers play it for the judge if you insist on going to trial.

Watch the part about the song that ended up being professionally released. It made the company some money. Cluestick: there is more than one business model, for those who can get with the new. Sooner or later, your shareholders will be furious with you if you don’t course-correct and modernize. Yes. They will. Eventually, your shareholders will be YouTubers, you know. And you’ll be what media used to be.

For insights about the political corruption and abuse that revolves around copyright laws (we won’t discuss this here in detail), see the references below. █

I have decided to end the blog, after doing around 800 postings over about 4 years.

[...]

2. The Current State of Copyright Law is too depressing

This leads me to my final reason for closing the blog which is independent of the first reason: my fear that the blog was becoming too negative in tone. I regard myself as a centrist. I believe very much that in proper doses copyright is essential for certain classes of works, especially commercial movies, commercial sound recordings, and commercial books, the core copyright industries. I accept that the level of proper doses will vary from person to person and that my recommended dose may be lower (or higher) than others. But in my view, and that of my cherished brother Sir Hugh Laddie, we are well past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage. Much like the U.S. economy, things are getting worse, not better. Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.

In setting up the rationalist background of his title, Professor Bently noted that the 2004 EC Staff Working Paper, the Gowers Report, and the EC-commissioned IVIR report had all approached the question rationally, with evidence-based and economic reasoning. Each had come out against extension.

Today, the leading European centres for intellectual property research have released a joint letter to EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, enclosing an impact assessment detailing the far reaching and negative effects of the proposal to extend the term of copyright in sound recordings. [...] “This Copyright Extension Directive, proposed by Commissioner Mccreevy, is likely to damage seriously the reputation of the Commission…”

Cheating is bad, but does cheating infringe on a video game publisher’s copyright? World of Warcraft-maker Blizzard, a subsidiary of Vivendi, is trying to argue in court that it does. If this argument succeeds, it could change the way all software copyrights operate in the eyes of the law.

This follows a similar move by Virgin, which earlier this year joined forces with the BPI on an ‘education campaign’ aimed at those sharing copyrighted files.

[...]

ISPs have been under pressure from the government to work with the music industry in targeting illegal file sharers this year. Ministers have even threatened to introduce anti-filesharing legislation if a solution is not reached.

France’s so-called Oliviennes strategy to combat copyright abuse includes a “three strikes and you are out” approach: offenders lose the right to an Internet account after being caught sharing copyright-protected music over the Internet for a third time.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to disconnect European file sharers from the Internet. The idea is already in the process of being realized in France, and will according to Sarkozy be a step toward “a civilized Internet” where ISPs watch the information that their customers exchange.

La Quadrature du Net (Squaring the Net) has seen the draft “Trust Online” Charter (FR) that the Ministry of the Interior is asking ISPs to sign by June 10th. The text confirms La Quadrature’s worst fears. Under the pretext of protecting users, the French government is attempting to put in place an all-encompassing Internet monitoring and filtering system. It seeks to avoid the usual processes of law-making, in order to impose disproportionate obligations on the ISPs – obligations which violate fundamental rights and which are contrary to the ethos of the Internet environment.

ISPs are calling on the record industry to put its money where its mouth is on illegal file-sharing, by underwriting the cost of lawsuits brought by people who are wrongly accused of downloading or uploading music.

[...]

It’s the latest public detail from long-running private negotiations that have hit mainstream media headlines today. The lobbying campaign to have government force ISPs to disconnect persistent illegal file-sharers scored a victory with a leak to The Times. The draft government document says: “We will move to legislate to require internet service providers to take action on illegal file-sharing.”

Schemes are being hatched to make it harder and harder to download copyrighted material across the internet. Seems they will be just as successful as the method to stop people recording CDs to tape in the “old days.” And just as ludicrous.

The Canadian legislation, which could be introduced as early as next week, is expected to use the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as a model.

[...]

Stoddart notes that if “DRM technologies only controlled copying and use of content, our Office would have few concerns”.

However, those same technologies can be used to collect personal information about computer users that is “transmitted back to the copyright owner or content provider, without the consent or knowledge of the user”.

Copyrights and patents are government granted monopolies. They have their origins in the feudal guild system, not the free market economics of Smith and Ricardo. In fact, at the end of the 19th century, Switzerland and the Netherlands actually eliminated patent and copyright protection, with the intent of promoting free market competition. In spite of their feudal legacy, and their obvious status as forms of protectionism, few economists ever question the merits of the patent and copyright systems.

The Pirate Party of the United States took a different position. “Being the lead counsel in a multi-year campaign of extortion, pretexting, and sham litigation should not be rewarded with a seat in any court, except perhaps as a defendant,” said the party’s chairman, Andrew Norton.

Yet governments continue to push ahead with this idiot idea — both Britain and Japan for example are considering extending existing terms. Why?

The answer is a kind of corruption of the political process. Or better, a “corruption” of the political process. I don’t mean corruption in the simple sense of bribery. I mean “corruption” in the sense that the system is so queered by the influence of money that it can’t even get an issue as simple and clear as term extension right.

EFF had asked for a ruling that the 30-second snippet did not violate copyright law; Fogel concluded it was unnecessary because “Universal has indicated it had and presently has no intention of ever asserting an infringement action directly against Lenz based on the ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ video.”

Andersen is going after the recording industry under conspiracy laws. She argues the Recording Industry Association of America, the industry’s trade group, and its affiliates worked together on a broad campaign to intimidate people into making financial payoffs. The defendants “secretly met and conspired” to develop a “litigation enterprise” with the ultimate goal of preserving the major record companies’ control over the music business. Andersen is requesting class action status for her case, seeking at least $5 million in compensation for the class

[...]

From her apartment outside Portland, Andersen remains involved in the broader case. She collects files on her suit and tracks other disputes with the RIAA online. One recent winter day, she sipped a Diet Pepsi and watched Tazz jump from the couch and settle on the floor. “You have to find some positive in stuff, too,” she says. “For whatever reason, I have been given a unique opportunity to fight this. I feel a responsibility in a way and want to help others. That pushes me along.”

After the lawsuit was filed, Njuguna said she boxed up the PC reportedly used for infringement and purchased a new one. She then filed a series of counterclaims to the RIAA’s lawsuit in an attempt to have the lawsuit dismissed and her name cleared. One of those accuses the record labels of failing to negotiate in good faith.

[...]

Njugana also accuses the RIAA of engaging in deceptive and unfair trade practices, arguing that the record labels have demonstrated repeated behavior that has an “adverse effect on the public interest.” She also cites former RIAA defendant Tanya Andersen’s lawsuit (which seeks class-action status) as evidence that, unless the courts step in at some point, the RIAA will continue its campaign.

And, he told his blog readers: “If [the industry tries to] keep up the strategy of ‘you need us badly and therefore we make the rules’ you will lose the artists, their managers… and the audience. Another 12 months for this Radiohead experiment to become the default approach. Get engaged or get outmoded. And do it soon.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed suit today against Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG), asking a federal court to protect the fair use and free speech rights of a mother who posted a short video of her toddler son dancing to a Prince song on the Internet.

One question, for instance, asks: “How would you promote the progress of science and creativity, as enumerated in the U.S. Constitution, by upholding and strengthening copyright law and preventing its diminishment?”

Fluxflux-eee, the pclinuxos 2008 remaster under Openbox windows manager has been released, as the 2008 08 version.

We have written about the previous version here, and the project developer is kindly offering us all a new version with many improvements. The .iso image of the system can be downloaded at the official page.

GNU/Linux

Ubuntu was pitted against the industry titans — Apple’s OS X and Microsoft Windows Vista. None of the computers were successfully hacked on day one. But by day two, the Mac had fallen victim to an attack and by day three, the Windows computer. Only the laptop running Ubuntu was intact by the end of the contest.

5 weeks have passed and the machine has not been rebooted other than for system (kernel) updates. Normally by this time I would have done at least a couple clean up jobs and possibly one OS re-install because of those 2 and they’re online shenanigans.

She uses gmail just fine, she watches youtube just fine. She figured out on her own how to burn a cd and she’s synced her ipod with photo’s take with her digital camera. She has not had a problem with any of her online bill paying. She has edited her MS Word resume and submitted to another company where she recently landed a nicer job with OpenOffice Writer.

Best of all. I haven’t received one single solitary phone call on the computer NOT working. Not one.

Parsix is a nice solid little distro, but I’m finding it difficult to list one hard compelling reason why someone should switch to it. If you prefer the Persian language and keyboard, then Parsix is definitely for you. If you’d like a nice Debian derivative with a pretty GNOME desktop that works good, comes in one CD, and uses APT/Synaptic, then perhaps give Parsix a try.

For someone with Linux experience the installer is user-friendly, but for someone coming straight from Windows it may not be. However, the system is as easy to use as any other. It has handy features and applications, and the Parsix software repositories have lots more.

Slackware is a old linux distrobution that is very powerful, customizable, and fast.

It runs on a fairly new 2.6 kernel, KDE 3.5.9 and it uses pkgtools as its package manager…

[...]

Ubuntu is a very user-friendly, gnome based linux distrobution. It has a great userbase and theres plenty of tech support for it too. It’s a great linux distro for someone who doesn’t like messing with Linux too much.

Konqueror as a web browser still unfortunately lags quite a way behind Firefox in terms of compatibility. For that reason, many KDE users stick with Firefox, despite the poorer integration between the desktop environment and the browser.

At the end of March in 2005 a bunch of people (15, if I recall correctly) gathered for an ad-hoc meeting in Berlin, Germany. There were artists, usability experts, developers, business managers and users. We all had one thing in mind: the future of KDE.

F/OSS

The open development model has also helped to define the development technology and tools used to build Drizzle. The code is licensed under the GNU GPLv2 and Aker insists that development should be based on a GNU tool chain. The core development is based on C99 and Posix.

As a result of adopting a GNU tool chain, Drizzle will only be available for Posix based operating systems. Currently these include Linux (Fedora), Solaris Express and Mac OS X.

One of the reasons that the GPL ignorance line was trotted out for so long might have been concern over the the SFLC’s criticism of the OSP. To put it in simple terms, the OSP does not travel with the code. So writing a (eg) GPL* implementation of an OSP covered specification in the expectation that the code may be re-used for other things (which is a cornerstone of interactions in the free software community) creates a problem. That code becomes encumbered by a patent mine which arms itself when the code is (non-conformingly) reused. At best, even with this addition to the FAQ, the OSP still fails to respect the freedom of free software implementations (whether GPL or otherwise) of covered specifications.** It is unclear, for example, what effect the “no surrender of others’ freedom” clauses of the relevant GPLs would be in the event of a successful patent action against a non-conforming implementation.

Here is another good article about bad OOXML. The headline, which poses a question, is overly optimistic, but the body is a concise and accurate summary of recent developments.

Is Microsoft’s Office Open XML a functional standard, and if not, why is it being rushed through the process?

Microsoft’s problems with OOXML just won’t go away. MS-OOXML was supposed to supplant the Open Document Format (ODF), but is becoming an embarrassment. As a format it betrays its hurried origins, and is over-complex. At best, it has technical problems. At worst, it is barely fit for purpose.

Questions are being asked in Europe about the way that Microsoft went about the standardisation process. At least four countries have succeeded in having their objections raised to the fast-tracking of OOXML through the International Standards Organisation (ISO), and as a consequence, the ISO has put the standard on hold, at least for the time being.

Microsoft has no date for implementing OOXML on its own platform, but has agreed to implement the rival ODF format on Microsoft Office. Microsoft has given its blessings to ODF by joining the OASIS committees, and to cap it all, a senior Microsoft spokesman has conceded that “ODF has clearly won”.

Clearly, there is a pressing need for an open standard for document formats. Documents that can be shared across platforms, across products, and across time. The solution to the problem is ODF, which was created by a technical committee of the OASIS industry consortium and has benefited from industry wide participation in its development. ODF gained acceptance as an ISO standard in May 2006.

Some time this month, having already coped with leaks, ISO will probably confirm that it has lost its dignity by permitting itself to be exploited by Microsoft for self benefit. █

I’m no mind reader, but the reception of the audiences at the events I was able to attend in person — in particular the Participate 08 panel and the Ramji keynote — tell me that many in the OSCON crowd weren’t taking Microsoft’s story at face value. That skepticism stems from two roots. First, it is far removed from the company’s historical views of open source as a “cancer” and “anti-American.” Second, the company has a history of “embracing and extending” competing technologies in a manner that crushes them.

Microsoft clearly has not changed its opinion of open source without a reason, and whatever that reason is, the change must be one that Microsoft’s management has decided is advantageous. So what is the play? What does the company hope to gain?

Conspiracy theorists will say that Redmond’s goal is to destroy open source, either by poisoning it from the inside or by co-opting it. There is a subtle difference between those scenarios, hidden in the terminology itself. Understanding that is the key to figuring out what Microsoft is really after.

Watch the wording. The use of negative terms like “conspiracy theorists” was criticised here before [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. It’s derogatory and it belittles the opposition to one’s belief. In this case, there’s clearly a plan (conspiring to keep Microsoft relevant in a “sea of change”), so it needn’t be “theorised”.

In fact, given that Microsoft itself is now saying that Mono should be ‘safe’ only for Novell’s customers, can anyone blame people for wanting it removed?

The nasty taste which has always ‘ever-so-slightly’ tainted my use of Ubuntu is that Mono is there only to support applications written in languages and for platforms which are basically Microsoft’s.

Platform assimilation as such is only valuable to Novell, which is not behaving like a team player, unless its team is now Microsoft and its ecosystem. Novell is still Microsoft's ticket to enter many FOSS companies, conferences, and other events. █